President's Report - FY10 Q4
Accessibility and Usability is seeing a transition from straight project reviews to early engagement and more involved consultative and educational work. Consulting projects have increased, both in numbers and scope to include involvement throughout the lifecycle of a project, from discovery through implementation.
- Kuali Coeus: OSP/Kuali invited and funded the travel of 2 usability consultants to attend a day-long research study at the University of Maryland. The study will directly impact the future UI and hopefully increase adoption of Kuali Coeus in 2011.
- RAFT (Reporting and Forecasting Tool): Usability remains integrally involved in RAFT, participating in steering committee meetings, focus groups, and initial design / workflow reviews.
- IS&T Communication Team: Accessibility actively consulted with IS&T Communication on accessible social networking components and bringing the IS&T website up to accessibility compliance standards.
- External Outreach: Accessibility staff conducted an accessibility best practices presentation for the Boston Educational Technology Group at WGBH. Teaching and IT professionals from 11 local colleges and universities attended.
- ATIC (Adaptive Technology) customer support expanded to include participants with disabilities enrolled at summer research programs RSI (Research Science Institute) and Saxelab (Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory).
- Fall Readiness: ATIC began reviewing its readiness to handle an announced increase in undergraduate students requiring alternative media to access their course materials. Exploring new service to create DAISY electronic books.
- AUX Issues and Trends
FY10 Q3
- ATIC hosted Adaptive Technology Open House on January 27, 2010, demonstrating technologies for persons with disabilities to 35 attendees who represented 10 different MIT DLCs.
- Collaborated with Terrascope Radio faculty to designate and successfully implement an alternative accessible sound editing software as part of the course curriculum. (Sony SoundForge was selected as the accessible alternative to Adobe Audition).
- Started development of Accessible PDF Curriculum to provide guidelines and training in creating PDF files that are accessible to users with disabilities.
- Engaged MIT Home Page Redesign to implement accessibility recommendations which positively impacted users with disabilities on campus.
- RAFT2 engagement of usability consulting resulted in an acceptance of more end user requests: e.g., a decision was reversed to include a feature set that could drastically improve efficiencies of PI's to manage their own finances.
- IAP Redesign Project early engagement of usability: 4 initial interviews discovered 3 unique means by which departments prepare, enter, and manage IAP offerings. This will serve as the basis to our recommendations as the IAP office considers doing an incremental improvement or an overall system rewrite to address actual usage needs.
- Implementation of IS&T web site accessibility recommendations have started.
- Accessibility/Usability combined reporting now being implemented on 90% of design reviews.
The Training Team conducted 75 training events attended by 563 members of the MIT Community. Highlights include:
RAFT Phase 1 – the project’s business sponsors deemed training a prerequisite for access to the system. An online RAFT training video augments class learning.
- Request for Payment (RFP) training delivered to pilot users responsible for acceptance testing. Implementation training scheduled for summer 2010
- Exchange rollout training to staff from VPF, Libraries, PSB, and Institute VIP staff.
- Developing curriculum for the Appointment Redesign (APR) project’s Appointment Change functionality, with training to be delivered in Q4. Also provided to training to SHASS pilot group
- Reached out to the community to understand training needs by providing a presentation to the Support Staff Working Group (SSWG) and by conducting a focus group on Web Publishing Training attended by DLC webmasters.
- Working with TAT to identify requirements – community wide and IS&T specific - for the Enterprise Learning SAP web portal
The Documentation Team updated 615 pages of documentation with the IS&T website and Hermes Knowledgebase. Highlights include
- Support for major software releases, including APR, RFP, TEM, VPN, Exchange, Xerox Printing, Adobe Keyserver, Windows 7, the updated MSCA, VMware, TSM (for Windows and Mac), and others.
- Continued implementation of information wizards that guide users to the right documentation.
- Improved the usability of the IS&T Network pages by archiving old pages, updating and clarifying current content, and implementing a knowledge wizard to streamline navigation.
- Extended authoring capabilities into IS&T areas to insure the development and publication of quality documentation for IS&T supported software releases and service updates.
FY10 Q2
Steve Winig's email to Patricia Sheppard and CSS Managers, cc: E. Aufiero and R. Smyser (dated 1/25/2010)
RE: CSS FY2010 Q2 Report Final Draft
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Steve Winig’s email to Elaine Aufiero and cc: Patricia Sheppard and css-managers@mit.edu (dated 1/7/2010)
SUBJECT: AUX 2010 Q2 Report - DRAFT
Elaine:
Here is the AUX Q2 report. We have asked Kathleen Monagle, the assistant dean of the Disabilities Services Office, to review the final Accessibility and ATIC related items to ensure that we don't inadvertently breach student confidentiality (she requested that we remove or rephrase one item from the earlier draft). So, there may be some additional updates tomorrow...
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